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by sokoloff 2952 days ago
No, they made it a federal crime to offer non-registered securities to non-wealthy people.

Registered securities (stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc.) are widely available to non-wealthy people and are probably a better investment for most of them, frankly, because of the concentration of risk inherent in a small dollar portfolio of non-registered securities and the idea that registered securities will have some standardized reporting requirements and that one could rely on the market to do a certain amount of due diligence and price discovery.
1 comments
CryptoPunk 2952 days ago
Non-registered securities are those that are issued by any company not worth over something on the order of $100 million, since any company smaller than that cannot afford to get their securities registered.

Anyway, this distinction doesn't change my point: offers of such securities to unaccredited investors are not categorically "scams". This kind of critical reductionism is reckless to individual rights and liberty.

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gamblor956 2952 days ago
Companies can get registered fairly cheaply; a company with almost no assets or value could do it.

The expense comes from meeting the requirements to be registered on a large exchange like NYSE or NASDAQ (both of which are non-governmental entities). This is why small companies that have public stock are traded on "penny" exchanges.

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CryptoPunk 2952 days ago
Fair point. There are the OTC exchanges.

In any case, I don't see any mom and pop shops offering their customers stock. There are only 10,000 companies with stock on the OTC market, out of 30 million in the US.

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